


into the forest

by Anonymous



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Non-graphic injury descriptions, based on chapter 126, spoilers big time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22604710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Maybe we should just live here together… Right, Levi?”For a moment, there was nothing Hange wanted more desperately. The feeling overpowered her, leaving only a twinge of self-disgust in the wake of its tidal wave. No one would find them – they would be unknown, untouched, unharmed. They would be alone, and they would be free.
Relationships: Hange Zoë & Levi, Hange Zoë/Levi, If ya squint - Relationship
Comments: 3
Kudos: 119
Collections: Anonymous





	into the forest

The water diluted the streaks of blood running down his face as Hange forcefully dabbed a damp cloth against Levi’s ghostly pale cheek.

Facial wounds bled a lot, she knew from experience, but these cuts were more or less to the bone. The blade was made for slicing through titan flesh, made to cut quickly, and most importantly, deeply. It had sliced though Levi’s thin skin like hot butter.

An outdated weapon in this age of gunfire and floating machinery, cogs and wheels.

Levi claimed he didn’t mind the thunder spears - he took to them like he was born with their triggers around his fingers. And wasn’t that close to the truth, anyway? The Ackerman clan was shaped for blood, modified for perfection. Any object became a weapon in his hands, as in Mikasa’s. But he kept the blades in any case. Reliable, he had called them. So much for that.

It was the blast of a thunder spear that slashed his face open, that tore through his eye and his lip, that impaled the shrapnel in his cheek and chest.

Hange sighed. She didn’t know how much time had passed since they arrived at the forest camp. The sun was quickly setting, but she had lost track of time while locating blankets, getting a fire started, cutting strips of cloth for bandages. There had been no time to rest or eat, and now her head swam with exhaustion.

_Duty first._

If her time in the Survey Corps had taught her anything, it was this. Duty rested on her shoulders like lead, growing heavier for each day. Every day, the tie marking her as Erwin’s successor lay snug against her throat. Every day, it felt more and more like a noose. How had he ever managed? In her memory, Erwin’s head was eternally held high, determination like steel in his gaze. In Hange’s memory, he was forever vibrant and alive. When she faced herself in the mirror on occasions few and far in between, her eyes were dull and vacant, her face slack and worn.

These days, a man dead and buried for four years seemed more full of life than her own reflection.

_Duty first._

She looked down at the body in front of her. She had stripped Levi of his shirt to clean the wounds in his chest, and the temperature was quickly dropping as the sun dipped below the evergreens surrounding them. She pulled the blanket up towards his chest, absently tucking him in as she considered what had to be done.

Levi’s was a face she had seen thousands upon thousands of times – in battle, in drills, sharing dinner over paperwork late at night and a quick breakfast in the morning. She had seen him ill, seen him exhausted, seen him injured many times before.

But this was something else. Levi’s raven hair was sticking to his forehead in clumps matted with blood, the rest feathering out against the blankets Hange had carefully spread over a soft-looking part of the forest floor. His face was always pale, even during the hottest parts of summer, but now it seemed like someone had opened a tap to drain all the colour out of him entirely. To Hange, the Levi lying still on the ground in front of her seemed not like the only friend she had left in her world, but rather like a porcelain doll that had been thrown on the ground by some negligent child and stepped on by careless boots.

She wished he would move. A twitch of a finger had been enough.

Levi in movement was a sight to behold, graceful and deadly, and there was no time she had wished more fiercely to see it than now.

A bat of an eyelash, a movement of the lips. Anything.

Hange was not one to take things for granted. She had tasted the bitterness of loss too many times for that, felt the crushing weight of defeat and the overwhelming frustration of deception and uncertainty. But if there was one constant she had begun to rely on, it was Levi in movement.

Now even that, the anchor tethering her to the hope that maybe there would be an end to all this after all, had been torn from her.

_Duty first._

Stitching a wound close was unpleasant work, but there was no choice in the matter.

She picked up the needle and the tweezers she had found in an abandoned first-aid kit, pretending that the skin she was piercing was one of the pig’s hides she’d used for practice as a cadet, and not the most familiar face she knew on this earth.

She had to sew quickly, before the wounds stared bleeding again.

Hange placed the stitches across the translucent skin of Levi’s sliced eyelid and along the thin bridge of his nose, following the lines of his face across his mouth and down to his small, pointed chin.

A final knot, and the work was done. She had done all she could. Hange tried not to think too hard about it – _she wasn’t a medic, what if the wounds would fester? What if dirt had gotten into them that she hadn’t noticed, what if the river water was polluted? –_ as she sat down heavily by Levi’s side, head in her hands.

“Well… now what do we do? We can’t stop Zeke on our own…”

Her own voice offered little comfort. As a child, she had talked to herself in lieu of the friends she had never learned how to make, the classmates that mocked her interest in strange frogs and her unwashed clothes. She felt little more than that child now, alone with an unconscious body in an unknown forest. The space of the woods seemed endless, the sounds of rustling pines overpowering.

Hange spoke to shut it out, to keep up the pretense that the fire was enough to keep her from shivering. From uncertainty or the cold, she wasn’t sure.

“Maybe we should just live here together… Right, Levi?”

It seemed a nice thought. They could stay here, away from it all. The woods were dark and deep, and certainly not very welcoming. For a moment, there was nothing Hange wanted more desperately. The feeling overpowered her, leaving only a twinge of self-disgust in the wake of its tidal wave. No one would find them – they would be unknown, untouched, unharmed. They would be alone, and they would be free.

The fire flickered precariously. The sun was gone now, and without it, the woods were freezing. Without anything left to do, she was aimless, restless. There had to be something –

The cart.

A new task, something to occupy her racing thoughts and her shaking hands. A cart to carry Levi while he slept – the wheels needed fixing, and the reins had been torn…

As soon as the thought of escape had appeared in her head, it was snuffed out.

-

When Levi awoke, it was with a curse on his lips and a broken rage in his eye. He had bided his time patiently, waiting like a circling hawk for the right time to strike. And when it had finally arrived, four years later, it had slipped from his fingers.

He had failed.

As Hange pushed him back down to the ground and covered him with the blanket once again, she could read the desperation and the bitter regret in his face. Even his voice seemed subdued, quiet, raspy.

“If we keep… running and hiding… What will that get us?”

Blood shot into Hange’s face as realisation set in. He had heard her speaking to herself like a lunatic, like a deserter. As if there weren’t more important things to this life than her childish desires of escape. As if war wasn’t bearing down on them in this very instance, as if the end of the world wasn’t looming on the horizon like a distant thunder cloud, ready to strike.

Levi barely spoke above a whisper. Between every other word was a rattling breath, as if the act of speaking was an unbearably difficult task.

“I know you… You’re not able to stay out of the action.”

The dream of freedom had been the one that had pushed her into the Survey Corps all those years ago. Of escape from the small cage of their world, of discovery and of release.

But now, as always, there was work to be done.

“Yeah, that’s right. I can’t”.

 _Duty first_.

As Hange lifted Levi up in her arms and secured him carefully on the cart with spare ropes, his body seemed unbearably frail and irretrievably broken.

Together, they left the forest behind.


End file.
